173 Responses to this entry

s(R) Says:

From a Morgan Stanley research email:

“Political fragmentation is testing Europe. The protest parties are galvanised by Brexit and demanding a similar vote elsewhere. While they poll strongly, whether they have enough support remains to be seen. Politics introduces a downside skew to growth.”

“Politics introduces a downside skew to growth”… One way of being always right is to reach conclusions which are always true.

Jealous of any XS readers in New York this week. Anybody know if there’ll be recordings for New Centre members?

{ Pomegranate has long been considered a ‘superfood’ but without much evidence as to why, but now researchers at Lausanne’s federal technology institute EPFL have discovered the fruit could protect against one of the major causes of aging.

Scientists at the world-leading university wanted to take a closer look at the ‘superfood’ claims for which “scientific proof has been fairly weak,” EPFL said in a statement on Monday.

And they discovered that a substance in pomegranate can be transformed by microbes in the gut into a molecule that enables muscle cells to counter the effects of aging.

In initial tests on rodents, the results of which have been published in journal Nature Medicine, “the effect is nothing short of amazing,” said the statement.

As people age, our cells struggle to recycle their mitochondria, powerful inner compartments within the cells that carry out vital functions.

The degradation of mitochondria affects the health of tissues, including muscles, which gradually weaken over the years and can play a role in age-related diseases such as Parkinson’s.

Scientists on the EPFL study found that a molecule called urolithin A managed to boost the cells’ ability to recycle their mitochondria.

I’m hoping by next CP a certain prolific shitposter/spammer (or two) will be gone. Forty percent of this otherwise useful comment thread is clogged with thousands of words of nonsense no one is even looking at.

The greater the perceived importance of Nurture (and “growth mindset” in particular), the more power, funding, and influence can be justified toward psychology, behavioral research, social services, and “community organization” – more power to the socialist state apparatus.

After all, if everything was 100% codified by Nature (genetics), what purpose would many of these psychology-based professions hold, exactly? The answer is obvious – they would rightly be perceived as completely worthless.

And how can you render obsolete what wasn’t necessary to begin with? Think of the whole Diversity Corp shakedown racket, a very lucrative and growing field of makework and intimidation. These are automation-proof “jobs.” No matter how far automation and Gnonic sciences go, there will be a hive of parasites “overseeing” everything and “ensuring standards are met.”

“Sexism, racism and other forms of discrimination are being built into the machine-learning algorithms that underlie the technology behind many “intelligent” systems that shape how we are categorized and advertised to…

This is fundamentally a data problem. Algorithms learn by being fed certain images, often chosen by engineers, and the system builds a model of the world based on those images. If a system is trained on photos of people who are overwhelmingly white, it will have a harder time recognizing nonwhite faces…

A very serious example was revealed in an investigation published last month by ProPublica. It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.
The reason those predictions are so skewed is still unknown, because the company responsible for these algorithms keeps its formulas secret — it’s proprietary information. Judges do rely on machine-driven risk assessments in different ways — some may even discount them entirely — but there is little they can do to understand the logic behind them.

Police departments across the United States are also deploying data-driven risk-assessment tools in “predictive policing” crime prevention efforts. In many cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami, software analyses of large sets of historical crime data are used to forecast where crime hot spots are most likely to emerge; the police are then directed to those areas.

At the very least, this software risks perpetuating an already vicious cycle, in which the police increase their presence in the same places they are already policing (or overpolicing), thus ensuring that more arrests come from those areas. In the United States, this could result in more surveillance in traditionally poorer, nonwhite neighborhoods, while wealthy, whiter neighborhoods are scrutinized even less. Predictive programs are only as good as the data they are trained on, and that data has a complex history.

Histories of discrimination can live on in digital platforms, and if they go unquestioned, they become part of the logic of everyday algorithmic systems. Another scandal emerged recently when it was revealed that Amazon’s same-day delivery service was unavailable for ZIP codes in predominantly black neighborhoods. The areas overlooked were remarkably similar to those affected by mortgage redlining in the mid-20th century. Amazon promised to redress the gaps, but it reminds us how systemic inequality can haunt machine intelligence.

And then there’s gender discrimination. Last July, computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University found that women were less likely than men to be shown ads on Google for highly paid jobs. The complexity of how search engines show ads to internet users makes it hard to say why this happened — whether the advertisers preferred showing the ads to men, or the outcome was an unintended consequence of the algorithms involved.
Regardless, algorithmic flaws aren’t easily discoverable: How would a woman know to apply for a job she never saw advertised? How might a black community learn that it were being overpoliced by software?
We need to be vigilant about how we design and train these machine-learning systems, or we will see ingrained forms of bias built into the artificial intelligence of the future.
Like all technologies before it, artificial intelligence will reflect the values of its creators.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

{AK}: Basically, this is the weaponisation of data, the algorithmic restatement of an ethno-reactive racist & sexist core that never actually went away. ‘Political Correctness’ was always a straw man; an exaggerated caricatural pretext, as noisy & ineffectual cultural inflation; used to justify so called ‘Neoreaction’ & it seems, this new layer of insidious, technical oppression.
The ‘demons’ are not in the ‘machine’, admin, they are you & your ‘Neoreactive’ hordes; legions for whom ‘love’ can only be avaricious craftiness, lol.

“It found that widely used software that assessed the risk of recidivism in criminals was twice as likely to mistakenly flag black defendants as being at a higher risk of committing future crimes. It was also twice as likely to incorrectly flag white defendants as low risk.”

“Mistakenly” and “incorrectly” relative to what, pray tell?

“The reason those predictions are so skewed is still unknown, because the company responsible for these algorithms keeps its formulas secret — it’s proprietary information.”

Implying that the reference ground isn’t secret, isn’t proprietary — so where is it?

All I see in the article, and in the article that is its source, is naked assertion.

lol, SVErshov , of course you’re right, but was there ever any ‘intelligence’, in the first place? If it is considered that there was, would it have been temporally determinable, in such a way, as to suggest the obsolence of reference you suggest? Or was it only a mythology; the Era of Intelligence; within the Epochs of Self & Thought?

I was working on a philosophy, in the early 1990s, that was ‘After Thought’ & ‘Beyond The Laws of Thought. What is held, under the sign of ‘Thinking’, is recontextualised away from the narrow metaphysical conventions of the usual contextual suspects of common, ‘anthropic’, cultural habits.

SVErshov Reply:July 21st, 2016 at 5:18 pm

we have two options here, first: extinct; second: become a zoo residents, robots will bring children from school and tell them, – see these people were thinking by means of words, ha ha ha … funny. they call themselves a philosophers. or, learn to think by means of images. we maybe have not noticed, but we already leaving in world dominated by images and its become 360 degree already. I was on fighter jet flight over Moscow few days ago, by using Oculus VR, sorry dont have a words to describe it. from philosophical point of view that would be naive naturalism, well better that then zoo.

[Arian Machinechrist]: “SVErshov: ‘After intelligence’ doesn´t make sense. It´d have to be, as it were, ‘supra-sensual.’ Buddhism is all up in this: parabrahman, paranirvana, what have you.
Of course it´s a mind gone wrong. Always trying to one-up what is already penultimate.
Decayed degeneration of the priestly caste.”

{AK}: Para Brahman, is Hinduism, not Buddhism.

“Para Brahman(Sanskrit:परब्रह्मन्) (IAST: para-brahman) is the “highest Brahman,” that which is beyond all descriptions and conceptualisations. In Advaita Vedanta sanguna Brahman, Brahman with qualities, is Para Brahman. In Vaishnavism and Shaivism Vishnu and Shiva, respectively, are para Brahman.” Para Brahman
“Nirguna Brahman (Devanagari निर्गुण ब्रह्मन्, nirguṇa brahman), Brahman without form or qualities,[9] is Para Brahman, the highest Brahman. According to Adi Shankara, nirguna Brahman is Para-Brahman,[10][11] and is a state of complete knowledge of self as being identical with the transcendental Brahman, a state of mental-spiritual enlightenment (Jnana yoga).” Advaita Vedanta – Nirguna Brahman

Secondly, the ‘penultimate’ necessarily leads to the ‘ultimate’ (‘late 17th century: from Latin paenultimus, from paene ‘almost’ + ultimus ‘last’, on the pattern of ultimate’).
What would you expect of an Absolutism, whether Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta, or Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, if not to consider the ‘ultimate’?
Thirdly, both Absolutisms were the result of Kshaitriya innovation (Buddha) & rebellion (Upanishadic Hinduism). Yes, one could say they were the result of priestly degeneration; the Brahmins were intoning Sanskrit words which they no longer understood; but it was due to the Kshaitriya that philosophic thought was once again emphasised. The priests had to acquiesce, so followed suit, & joined the resurgence.
The only ‘wrongness’, is your insular & historically erroneous interpretation. Your ‘machine’ is glitching, lol.

[Arian Machinechrist]: “SVErshov: ‘After intelligence’ doesn´t make sense. It´d have to be, as it were, ‘supra-sensual.’ Buddhism is all up in this: parabrahman, paranirvana, what have you.
Of course it´s a mind gone wrong. Always trying to one-up what is already penultimate.
Decayed degeneration of the priestly caste.”

{AK}: Para Brahman, is Hinduism, not Buddhism.

“Para Brahman(Sanskrit:परब्रह्मन्) (IAST: para-brahman) is the “highest Brahman,” that which is beyond all descriptions and conceptualisations. In Advaita Vedanta sanguna Brahman, Brahman with qualities, is Para Brahman. In Vaishnavism and Shaivism Vishnu and Shiva, respectively, are para Brahman.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Para_Brahman

“Nirguna Brahman (Devanagari निर्गुण ब्रह्मन्, nirguṇa brahman), Brahman without form or qualities,[9] is Para Brahman, the highest Brahman. According to Adi Shankara, nirguna Brahman is Para-Brahman,[10][11] and is a state of complete knowledge of self as being identical with the transcendental Brahman, a state of mental-spiritual enlightenment (Jnana yoga).” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Para_Brahman#Advaita_Vedanta_-_Nirguna_Brahman

Secondly, the ‘penultimate’ necessarily leads to the ‘ultimate’ (‘late 17th century: from Latin paenultimus, from paene ‘almost’ + ultimus ‘last’, on the pattern of ultimate’).
What would you expect of an Absolutism, whether Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta, or Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, if not to consider the ‘ultimate’?
Thirdly, both Absolutisms were the result of Kshaitriya innovation (Buddha) & rebellion (Upanishadic Hinduism). Yes, one could say they were the result of priestly degeneration; the Brahmins were intoning Sanskrit words which they no longer understood; but it was due to the Kshaitriya that philosophic thought was once again emphasised. The priests had to acquiesce, so followed suit, & joined the resurgence.
The only ‘wrongness’, is your insular & historically erroneous interpretation. Your ‘machine’ is glitching, lol.

[Arian Machinechrist]: “SVErshov: ‘After intelligence’ doesn´t make sense. It´d have to be, as it were, ‘supra-sensual.’ Buddhism is all up in this: parabrahman, paranirvana, what have you.
Of course it´s a mind gone wrong. Always trying to one-up what is already penultimate.
Decayed degeneration of the priestly caste.”

{AK}: Para Brahman, is Hinduism, not Buddhism.

“Para Brahman(Sanskrit:परब्रह्मन्) (IAST: para-brahman) is the “highest Brahman,” that which is beyond all descriptions and conceptualisations. In Advaita Vedanta sanguna Brahman, Brahman with qualities, is Para Brahman. In Vaishnavism and Shaivism Vishnu and Shiva, respectively, are para Brahman.”

“Nirguna Brahman (Devanagari निर्गुण ब्रह्मन्, nirguṇa brahman), Brahman without form or qualities,[9] is Para Brahman, the highest Brahman. According to Adi Shankara, nirguna Brahman is Para-Brahman,[10][11] and is a state of complete knowledge of self as being identical with the transcendental Brahman, a state of mental-spiritual enlightenment (Jnana yoga).”

Secondly, the ‘penultimate’ necessarily leads to the ‘ultimate’ (‘late 17th century: from Latin paenultimus, from paene ‘almost’ + ultimus ‘last’, on the pattern of ultimate’).
What would you expect of an Absolutism, whether Sankara’s Advaita Vedanta, or Nagarjuna’s Madhyamika, if not to consider the ‘ultimate’?
Thirdly, both Absolutisms were the result of Kshaitriya innovation (Buddha) & rebellion (Upanishadic Hinduism). Yes, one could say they were the result of priestly degeneration; the Brahmins were intoning Sanskrit words which they no longer understood; but it was due to the Kshaitriya that philosophic thought was once again emphasised. The priests had to acquiesce, so followed suit, & joined the resurgence.
The only ‘wrongness’, is your insular & historically erroneous interpretation. Your ‘machine’ is glitching, lol.

Buddhism is a vast nework of ideas, only Hinduism is larger. So, of course, both are going to have ‘superstitious’ & ‘priestly’ elements, They are ‘religions, after all.
But your initial claim: “Buddhism is all up in this: parabrahman, paranirvana”: though relatively true of the Madhyamika, etc., is an absolute & exclusive claim, that neglects doctrinal & practice variations.
Nevertheless, from a so-called parabrahman, or paranirvana, perspective, priestliness & superstition are just relativised practices; even ‘Science’ would be considered as a superstition; Nagarjuna would be relentless, in this regard.

But you can take an ‘insular’ view, if you like, see what it produces; the ‘Christian-Islamic-Satanic Insularity’. It always seems to the Occidentons, lol, turning into demons .
They say it’s Kalijuga, so I guess that’s the role of the ‘Atlanteans’. lol

It is legal to read sentences other than those you construct, but I guess that’s not ‘illegal’, so better to leave you in your Hall of Mirrors, where you can enjoy the pure exclusivity of reading only yourself, & the uninterrupted violation of any understanding beyond such reading.

As for a subtle exegesis of your proposal: { *nothing* *makes* sense }
This again calls for the metaphysics that are beyond most men.
The void makes the sense? It projects forth sensus.
Dive into Meister Eckhart, and Japs beyond
mum Mishima type o life & authorship.
creatio ex nihilo, is a doctrine
not for the faint minded.

Schopenhauer:
“On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains
after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still
full of the will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to
those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this
very real world of ours with all its suns and galaxies, is ­
nothing.
This “nothing,” however, “is also the Prajna­Paramita of the
Buddhists, the ‘beyond all knowledge,’ in other words, the
point where subject and object no longer exist.” (WWR, pp
411­12)

I guess, if anything can be ‘Nothing’, i.e., if no determinate substantia can be said to obtain, in such a way, as to ground traditional metaphysical schemas, or ‘worlds’; according to the remits of the usual dogmatisms; then ineluctably another way of proceeding comes into play, beyond & other than the usual response of simply restating neglected metaphysica, as ‘positions’ or posited anchors. The angst of anchoring proves redundant.

SVErshov Reply:July 21st, 2016 at 11:27 am

only thing to reconsider is that AI is not entirely algorithmic. In algorithm, designed by humans, we can predict everything. for example image analysis, by looking at two images containing 10 and 15 apples AI can tell that on image with 15 apple, more apples, without counting actual apples.

Sorry, I don’t feel that machined ‘grades’ are sufficient for either para brahman or paranirvana; though I guess they have their limited role. As for ‘thinking’?
I’ll answer the others when I get a chance, bit busy atm .

‘Machine’ and ‘magic’ share the same root. To me they mean the same thing.

DEUS MECHANICUS OPERATUS OMNIBUS ET GLORIUS

Yes.

||||| Reply:July 21st, 2016 at 7:18 pm

“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup, ” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his
thoughts .

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George
what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like some dipshit at the New York Times whining about something they know nothing about, ” said George .

The problem with this sort of analysis is that its written from complete ignorance of how these types of algorithms work. The algorithm can’t be racist any more than the sum of 4 + 4 is racist (and if you think that’s racist it’ll be hard to find common ground). Once this is realized most arguments shift to the racism of the training data set – but this data set is just historical. The algorithm doesn’t draw any conclusions from the data that don’t have a solid, mathematical basis there. That being said, the algorithms don’t always produce great results, but these estimates are probabilities not certainties – so it’s pretty hard to draw the conclusion the author draws without some sort of statistical analysis.

The problem with these articles is they start with a foregone conclusion (usually with some vague moral underpinning) and then just point out how many things violate that conclusion. That’s virtually the opposite of rationality.

Their baseline is that hate is not natural but taught, so if an algorithm mistakes Danny Glover for Harambe or something, it’s because an evil white coder fed such bigotry into the algorithm. Pattern recognition is racis’.

“If whitey be constructing systemic racism n’ shieet” why don’t you let us exit? We don’t want to support you, and ostensibly you don’t like us. So why won’t you let us live in our systemically racist communities that excludes you? Sounds like a win-win. You live in your post-racist commie utopia, we’ll live in our racist bigoted misery. But no, wherever whitey retreats, you have to follow and then complain that he be racis.

Evangelical missionaries have a history of targeting people to convert them away from Orthodox Christianity. They even do deceptive things like setup icons despite the fact that evangelicals believe it is idolatry.

It has been my intention for some time make a contribution to the dark enlightenment. My goal is not simply to comment on the writings of Mencius Moldbug and others, but to invent on, and hopefully expand the subject. This may encounter some resistance. There are writers in the field who want to treat it as a gospel, rather than as a living salon subject to change and improvement. Stagnation is how a philosophical field dies a slow death. Leftward drift in another. We must avoid both. The dark enlightenment is not a religion, and lacks the necessary and psychologically fulfilling trappings of faith that would allow dogma to be maintained unchanged. There is no living body of worshipers. It must grow to survive.

Predictably my output has declined in both volume and quantity in the run up to this. I apologize if I have not contributed much to the discourse recently.

We live in a golden age of enlightenment. The beings inhabiting this space have no respect for it, instead preferring to remake the degraded conditions of their prior circumstance. One million years of tribal communism was one million years of economic depression, and half the population, (the left) longs for a return to it. Half the population doesn’t get it. Our glorious system, capitalism, has delivered us from ourselves, is resented by millions, and is better that the human primate deserves.

>Controlled expression of either the xenophobic or equality impulse form the basis of all successful governments. Systems that attempt to suppress all human nature fail.*

I think this is where your otherwise great analysis terribly fails. Why would there be such a thing as an equality instinct? It wasn’t there for thousands of years, everybody rather tried to themselves become an aristocrat than to try to bring aristocrats down. Equality is either just a historically recent fad and fashion, or not even that: simply a trick, when you want to rise higher than others, just pretend that all you want is equality, and pretend that you are lower (or be really lower) and this gets you some sympathy. There is probably a reciprocity instinct, but egalitarianism merely hijacks that. In a species strongly evolved for status, prestige, dominance competition, there can be no equality instinct, as equality means you literally stop competing for more status once you got equal status and just who would do that really? Everybody wants to win. Equality is a tie, and who plays for ties? This is why equality is probably nothing more than a trick, people play to win but to seem less threatening they say a fair and equitable tie will be enough. Then of course when they get there it will not be enough.

If we would call an equality instinct specifically a white thing, going back to Ancient Greece where even when they had kings they refused to prostrate before them and considered Persians slaves of their kings because they prostrated, that could be perhaps more arguable. Seems whites have too much testosterone to accept servitude. At least stories like this about Cyrus the Great https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malakia#Greek_attitude_toward_effeminacy show a marked difference between white and Persian etc. attitudes towards servitude.

But this is not a human universal, and we hardly see any drive towards equality from Mexico to Africa.

You’re correct Frank. And The Dividualist is just mincing words. Call it envy, equality, fairness, hatred of those that have more, sense of injustice, covetousness, “rage against the machine,” hatred of the system, “economic justice,” “universal love,” “sharing all the world,” etc. Humans have a hundred ways to express envy. It’s all at its core a desire to smash the other monkey and take his stuff. Suppressing the impulse is the basis of maturity and civilization.

The fact that there are conflicting impulses like status seeking, power seeking, etc. does nothing to refute the existence of envy. Conflict in human nature is the basis of conflict between humans. The same man may want equality when he is poor and status when he becomes middle-class.

A classic mistake by both libertarians and liberals is to say “these words conflict with one another therefore reality isn’t true.” Understanding that human conflict is rooted in the human himself/herself destroys both the non-aggression argument and the universalist equality argument. Sine no consistency is possible no resolution to conflict is either. And that means some form of hierarchy/oppression in inevitable.

4. Envy can still be reduced to social status competition. When Envious Eric covets what you have, what he really covets is your social status, rank, standing conveyed by your possessions. “I want to have what you have” = “I want to be seen and treated as you are seen and treated”. And this is merely a _tactic_, if you give in to the demands saying “well, I suppose that is fair, all right”, the next step is Envious Eric saying “well, now we are on equal footing, now we can have an equitable competition about who really wins” and then he proceeds to try to get HIGHER status than yours (including, MORE possessions). This is a tactic. A trick. Not an instinct.

5. Hence envy/equality is reducible to mere tactics in the status, prestige, dominance competition game/instinct. THAT is the core human instinct.

6. Xenophobia as instinct – if you mean ingroup/outgroup tribalism then yes. I too tend to reduce things to tribalism and status. However it is again not ideal wording – it is not phobia, not fear, not even hate. It is status competition with the other group. It is about which group dominates which group. It is about dominant conquerors and submissive conquered.

I have no idea what seemed libertarian about this – it is far, far darker.

“We do not acknowledge the brotherhood of people,
only blood brotherhood.
We want freedom, not of herds, but of duty.
We hate the propaganda of equality.
Struggle is the father of all things.
Equality is death.“
Rudolf Sebottendorff

▬ { Envy can still be reduced to social status competition. When Envious Eric covets what you have, what he really covets is your social status, rank, standing conveyed by your possessions. “I want to have what you have” = “I want to be seen and treated as you are seen and treated”. And this is merely a _tactic_, if you give in to the demands saying “well, I suppose that is fair, all right”, }

You’re absolutely right and I agree with everything you just said. I considered calling it the envy impulse. I may still change it later. If I call it the envy impulse it allows shitlibs to miss the point and think that equality isn’t just envy. If I call it the equality impulse it sounds like I may be legitimizing the envy that constitutes the drive towards equality.

This is just a rough draft.

If I try to address liberal compulsive misinterpretation in everything I write nothing will ever get written and the lessons I intend to convey will not be summarized briefly enough for the average reader to get. They will be lost in a haystack of arguments against the left.

Humans will compulsively misinterpretate. It’s what they do. That forms the basis for the decay of knowledge.

Some paragraph will be added to the final draft that addresses this problem and demonstrates that equality and envy have the same emotional status seeking root.

People bastardize knowledge because they desire to see a reflection of themselves in the universe where none exists. The universe is an alien system that formed human desires as a response to its inhuman principles and not as a manifestation of them.

@BarnabasHow do you guys read this stuff without feeling a lustful desire to scrub the face of the planet clean of these ideas?

Anyway, the answer is clearly to popularize and militantly work on libertarian, anarchist neocamerialism and ensuring that those ideas are implemented. If so, literally none of this will ever be a problem. Thankfully the alt-right has given great power to the right in general, and now it’s just a matter of sweeping in and seriously working to make these lofty theories into a reality through the system itself. I have no idea how. Call me a dreamer, or call me a realist. I think it’s absolutely possible.

It’s just a matter of believing it can be done, and doing it. An-cap isn’t just an idea, neither is the neocameralist thing. These are real ideas and like other ideas, they can and will be taken seriously. And by seriously I mean, implemented in reality. The fucking commies do it, all people do it. So let’s do it too. I don’t think of it as a joke, we can actually do it. What “it” is, I don’t know.

All I know is that I want real life libertarian/neoreaction in our political system and as far as I can tell we actually have a real chance to begin doing that if you want.

I disagree. The reaction is Liberty & Creativity against Equality & Bureaucracy, even against Fraternité (which, it could be argued, is a Communist as in Communal Christian Tradition).

Christianity replaced, with its communism, the Pater-client relation of the Imperium.

▬{ The distinctive social relationship of ancient Rome was that between patron (patronus) and client (cliens). Although the obligations of this relationship were mutual, they were also hierarchical. The relationship was not a unit, but a network (clientela), as a patronus might himself be obligated to someone of higher status or greater power, and a cliens might have more than one patron, whose interests might come into conflict. If the familia was the discrete unit underlying society, these interlocking networks countered that autonomy and created the bonds that made a complex society possible. Although one of the major spheres of activity within patron-client relations was the law courts, patronage was not itself a legal contract; the pressures to uphold one’s obligations were moral, founded on the quality of fides, “trust” (see Values below), and the mos.[6] Patronage served as a model when conquerors or governors abroad established personal ties as patron to whole communities, ties which then might be perpetuated as a family obligation. In this sense, mos becomes less a matter of unchanging tradition than precedent.

…
But because the mos maiorum was a matter of custom, not written law, the complex norms it embodied evolved over time. The ability to preserve a strongly centralized sense of identity while adapting to changing circumstances permitted the expansionism that took Rome from city-state to world power. The preservation of the mos maiorum depended on consensus and moderation among the ruling elite, whose competition for power and status threatened it.
Democratic politics driven by the charismatic appeal of individuals (populares) to the Roman people (populus) potentially undermined the conservative principle of the mos.[12] Because the higher magistracies and priesthoods were originally the prerogative of the patricians, the efforts of plebeians (the plebs) for access could be cast as a threat to tradition (see Conflict of the Orders). Reform was accomplished through legislation, and written law replaced consensus. When plebeians gained admission to nearly all the highest offices except for a few arcane priesthoods, the interests of plebeian families who ascended to the elite began to align with those of the patricians, creating Rome’s nobiles, an elite social status of nebulous definition during the Republic. The plebs and their support of popular politicians continued as a threat to the mos and elite consensus into the late Republic, as evidenced in the rhetoric of Cicero.
The auctoritas maiorum (“ancestral authority”) could be evoked to validate social developments in the name of tradition. Following the collapse of the Republic after the death of Julius Caesar, Augustus disguised his radical program under a piety toward the mos maiorum.
During the transition to the Christian Empire, Symmachus argued that Rome’s continued prosperity and stability depended on preserving the mos maiorum, while the early Christian poet Prudentius dismissed the blind adherence to tradition as “the superstition of old grandpas” (superstitio veterum avorum) and inferior to the new revealed truth of Christianity. }
— Wiki.

The Oriental & Levantine psyche invaded Europe in various guises, with its communism (a blended soul, i.e. no ‘I’— thus non-anthropos, ‘demonic’), and anarcho-tyrranny; but it was always pushed back, or the system re-invigorated by the Nordics in fresh invasions from the North. (This is all of ancient and medieval history. From the Greeks, to the last invasion, I guess in the 12 century. This is all Encylopedia-tier info.)

▬{ Those who live between the Rhine and the Vistula, between the Baltic and the Alps, are only the heart of an immense territory inhabited by other heirs of ancient Thule. To this Halgadom belong not only the Germans, but also many other Europeans: the Scandinavians, faithful to their Nordic origins; the Netherlanders, more German than the Germans; the British, divided between Celts and Saxons; the French, heirs of the Franks and regenerated by the Normans or the Burgundians; the Italians in whose veins runs the blood of the Lombards; the Spaniards, who still carry many an imprint of the Visigoths. And also the Russians, whose country was founded by Swedish Varegs, those Vikings of the rivers and steppes… }

Incidentally, as will more likely happen with theories that are historically & archaeologically factual, new evidence appears:

{ An international team of scientists have sequenced the genome of a 37,000-year-old male skeleton found in Kostenki in Russia.

The study, which was recently published in Science, sheds entirely new light on who we are as Europeans.

“From a genetic point of view he’s an European,” says Professor Eske Willerslev, Director of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, who was involved in the new study, and adds:

“Actually, he is closer to Danes, Swedes, Finns and Russians than to Frenchmen, Spaniards and Germans”.

Split happened within a 8.000 year gap
The new results reveal that the man is the oldest that we know of so far to genetically represent a separate line from the forebears of present-day Asians. This is decisive when it comes to dating one of the most important events in history.

“We can now date the separation time between Asians and Europeans,” says Professor Rasmus Nielsen from the University of Copenhagen and the University of California, Berkeley, who was also involved in the study.

He points out that the Kostenki genome sets a line 37,000 years ago. Here the lines must have split, while the 45,000-year-old genome from the recently discovered Ust’ Ishim in Siberia sets the limit in the other direction.

This gives the answer to one of the biggest questions in the history of mankind; scientists now know that it is within the 8000 year gap that Europeans and Asians went their separate ways.

Meta-population: sex across populations
Previously the impression was that our forebears lived in separate populations and had children within the group, instead, Willerslev now paints a very different picture consisting of one large meta-population.

A meta-population consists of several populations which mate with each other.

The meta-population is connected through the neighbour’s neighbours, consisting of people who generally resemble each other a lot, but who also have their own unique traits.

“It was a huge, complex network, and not separate branches that lived in isolation,” says Willerslev.

He believes the Europeans must have been one enormous meta-population stretching across Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Kostenki fossils were excavated in 1954. The photo shows the leader of the expedition, A.N. Rogachev (left) and M.M. Gerasimov (right). (Photo: Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography)
It is possible to follow the genetic trail; all the way from the Kostenki genome, to hunter-gatherers in Siberia 25,000 years ago and farmers 7-8000 years ago in Spain, Luxembourg and Sweden, up to present-day Europeans.

Mixed opinions
A study published in September, led by two professors, Johannes Krause from Eberhard Karl’s Universität Tübingen in Germany and David Reich from Harvard University in the US, concluded that present-day Europeans descends from at least three separate groups.

David Reich acknowledges the importance of the new study, but is not convinced that it changes history very much.

“It’s wonderful to have the Kostenki genome and it’s also important and interesting to find a degree of continuity from the population represented by Kostenki to present-day Europeans,” says Reich and adds:

“On the basis of a statistical test or two, it’s a pretty far-reaching conclusion as to how our history proceeded. However, It’s exciting – if it’s true”.

Watch an interview with Eske Willerslev. Video: Centre for GeoGenetics, University of Copenhagen.

Extremely important if true
Although Willerslev and Nielsen admit that further tests could be carried out, they are pretty convinced that their idea is waterproof.

The Swedish scientist Pontus Skoglund from Harvard University, who was not involved in either Willerslev’s new study or that of Reich, published in September, also finds it quite convincing.

“It’ll be interesting to see more tests done, and as a field we need the time to digest these conclusions. But for now, it looks as though it may well be true, in which case it is an extremely important result,” says Skoglund.

Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans
It turns out that Scandinavians are more closely related to the Kostenki man than any other now-living population. This means that Scandinavians are the earliest Europeans.

However, the genome also indicates that many European traits, including those from the Middle East, were already present in the first Europeans.

So from a genetic point of view it makes no sense to categorise the Scandinavians as a separate people. “In those days people didn’t respect our virtuous, well-ordered ideas of belonging to specific groups,” comments Professor of Evolutionary Studies, Peter C. Kjærgaard, from Aarhus University. }

Are you joking? That’s not a rhetorical question — I honestly can’t tell.

– AI has made tremendous progress over the past few years. For one obvious example, conquering Go was no small task.

– Clinical diagnostics (all types of diagnostics, really,) can easily be performed by AI. In fact, AI is uniquely well suited to that sort of task. Most diagnostic scans — like FDG-PET — can be accurately interpreted by narrow and simple artificial intelligences. Simple complaints — for e.g., a rash like pompholyx — can be very accurately diagnosed via a combination of reverse image search and questionnaire. AIs can interpret blood chemistry and suggest medication. If they have large enough datasets, they can also run meta-analyses, post-marketing statistical surveys, and much more.
…It’s not that they AIs are unable to diagnose disease — to the contrary, I’m convinced they can already do a better job than most physicians — but that there are a hell of a lot of red tape and legal liability issues.

“In white working-class middle-America families, we are taught that we are captains of our own destinies, and that we are only limited by ourselves. We are cautioned to not even use language that would identify us as “losers” or “whiners”, because then we would become stuck in that position and not find our way out to something better, or at least something we can tolerate.

We admiringly use terms like “managing pain with grace” and “keeping a stiff upper lip”. Socially, these stoic behaviors will cause someone to become greatly respected, while the inverse relegates one to the unfortunate land of “clueless and ungraceful” or, worse, “unable to manage one’s obligations,” or the socially damning label “perpetual victim/white trash”.

(….)

If a white person cares about you, they will offer internal tools to help you on your path to self-actualization and internal peace. The only tools they can share are the ones they have. The tragedy is that, perhaps, those tools aren’t completely effective to manage the African-American experience, but then white Americans get all weird and feel like their core values are being rejected, and experience the shockingly unfamiliar feeling that maybe, this is something they don’t actually know how to fix.

And as a white American, THAT is the hardest realization to get past – we can’t fix it – and by embracing this realization, we enter into the deeply repugnant experience of weakness in the face of forces beyond our control. From there, we are teachable. Trying to bring us there by telling us we’re just a bunch of stupid racists is like pissing in the wind – you might initially feel better, but you’re just going to end up in a worse position than when you started.

I’ve always felt that if society frivolously yells at white people enough, calling them “racist”, then at a certain point, those white people may well eventually think to themselves, “Fuck it, guess I’m just gonna be a racist then”.

We may currently be startlingly close to the breaking point which catalyzes this backlash. Unlike some, I don’t personally see this occurrence as necessarily being particularly appealing.

To be honest, I’m always a bit ambivalent when it comes to race. Having had a full-on racist dad (passionately anti-semitic after serving in the Parachute Regiment in Palestine and seeing his best mates killed by the Stern Gang, and possessing a profound loathing of Pakis and nig-nogs), I naturally rebelled against all that in my teens and became something of a hippy. Then subsequently in the course of extensive experimentation with psychedelics, I had a couple of classic mystical Unity experiences, so overwhelmingly powerful that they still echo to this day. So while fully appreciating the cogency of DENRx race attitudes intellectually, I’m nevertheless somehow incapable of ever taking them completely seriously for very long.
Like the red pill keeps wearing off because I’ve taken better ones.

The fact that Londoners showed little sympathy for Brexit is telling: People who experience true mass immigration first-hand tend to stop seeing it as a problem. “Backlash,” as Tyler Cowen calls it, is a symptom of insufficient migration – the zone where immigrants are noticeable but not ubiquitous. I know he disagrees, but I honestly can’t figure out why.”

“The Great Filter” is a fallacy, and for many reasons. Take a moment to reflect upon what “The Great Filter” takes for granted — of how much of it rests upon assumptions. At the very least, it’s a particularly bad argumentum ad ignorantiam.

We’re not that much better than Galileo was at observing things in our galaxy. Our search volumes are not very large, and, besides, SETI’s original premise now seems pretty silly. And let’s not forget that any civilization sufficiently advanced to span the entire galaxy would also be capable of manipulating our observations, of simply evading detection, or of keeping us in a galactic nature preserve. (For that matter, they may have busted out of this wretched simulation long ago.)

…”The Great Filter” is not even useful conceptually, or as a thought experiment. It has negative value — it’s a waste of time. It’ll remain a waste of time until we can meaningfully test its assumptions. We’ll likely need another 2000 years of technological development to get to that point.

Downloading minds is one of our favourite “pet theories” that most of us know will almost certainly never work. Also, Admin has already dealt with it, so you seem to be talking about someone else, not here.

What is a human but chemicals, molecules, and electric impulses? Humans are finite things, necessarily. It is merely the peculiar complexity of the human that frustrates our efforts. (A more pernicious niggle being that such experiments are very likely to produce dead subjects, something quite frowned upon.)

{ In England in 1300 surnames varied substantially in average social status.
Surnames were first adopted by the upper classes. The Domesday Book of 1086
records surnames for many major landholders, these being mainly the Norman,
Breton and Flemish conquerors of England in 1066. These surnames derived mainly
from the home estates of these lords in Normandy. They have remained a
distinctive class of surnames throughout English history. They include many still
well known: Baskerville, Darcy, Mandeville, Montgomery, Neville, Percy, Punchard, and
Talbot. “Norman” surnames were identified as a sample of the surnames of
landlords in the Domesday book identified by Keats-Rohan as deriving from place
names in Normandy, Brittany or Flanders (1999). All possible derivations from
these original surnames were included.
Another, later, vintage of high status surnames were those of landholders listed
in the Inquisitions Post Mortem of 1236-1299. The Inquisitions were enquiries into
successors of the feudal tenants of the king. Among these property owners were
many with relatively rare surnames of more recent English origin, again mainly
deriving from the location of their estates: Berkeley, Pakenham, etc }

“things come full circle, the revolution began in France, it will end in France”

this is not where it begins nor where it ends.

countless cities and civilizations have fallen in his reaping of the fields with his scythe; the name of france is but a speck of dust on a fragment of a racing thought in his infinite mind.

the revolution ends where it begins, true, but it begun not with the second vatican council, nor dit it begin in france. not in germany with protestantism, nor with guelphism, not in the falll of constantinople, not in the burning of alexandria, not in the disappearance of the original roman families and thus not in the disappearance of true and veracious rome, not in the democratization and denordification of ancient greece, not even in the degeneration of the understanding of the most archaic doctrines of the ancient indians, not in the fall of atlantis nor in the depravity of the antediluvians that caused the flood.

it begins superborealis. in ultima thule; in the primarchs desire and sadomasochistic lust.

why would he otherwise dream of a world such as this one and materialize in it as putrid flesh?

Just a hunch, in many cases it seems to be less about being able to express some identity you authentically have (I for one agree with Zizek that gender identity is NEVER that straightforward), and more about a heartfelt rejection of the one you’re socially expected to express, supposedly because of an accident of birth. Since one thing I strongly associate with autism spectrum disorders is the inability to bellyfeel social norms and expectations, the connection is pretty self-explamatory to me.

It would become pretty hard to identify you and your will, including to, eh, yourself.
Selves only ‘exist’ in dialectical tension with their working materials, so that both reductionism and absolute voluntarist subjectivity lead to de-personalization.

And we learn to our amazement from French parliamentarian Bernard Carayon that George Soros has been masterminding the refugee influx via over a hundred NGOs that….

“whisper in the ear of the European Union to encourage the settlement of migrants. One hundred NGOs advocate and encourage the settlement of these migrants in Europe. A third of them are being subsidized by the European Union and the Open Society of George Soros, a network of foundations, partners, and projects in more than 100 countries.”

At the opening of the trial when Slobodan Milošević presented pictures of beheaded Serbs and Judge May said that is irrelevant. Milosevic said:

“It’s not on the screens that the public sees. Right. I see it on this screen now. But this internal screen only. So he is holding a head, the head of a Serb that he cut off. So those are the 20,000 Mujahedin that were brought to the European theatre of war through Clinton’s policy, and most of them remained there and some went to America and to other countries, and they went all around Europe.

And then when they start beheading your own people in wars to come, then you will know what this is all about.”

“Christ said ‘I am the Truth’. He did not say, ‘I am custom’.”
-Pope St. Gregory VII, citing Tertullian

“There are times when an elevated spirit is a true infirmity. No one understands it. It even passes for a kind of mental limitation.”
-Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe

“Now battle had to be joined, and therefore men were needed to restore a new order, and new theologians as well, to whom the evil was manifest from its outward phenomena down to its most subtle roots; then the time would come for the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash. For this reason individuals had the duty of living in alliance with others, gathering the treasure of a new rule of law. But the alliance had to be stronger than before, and they more conscious of it.”
-Ernst Jünger, Auf den Marmorklippen, XX

Pope Francis has been out to the Border once again, welcoming refugees and licking their feet from dawn til dusk. Millions waiting in line. This time he returns barehead, barefeet, clothed in a pink singlet and tight red trousers too short for him, a gift from a “Syrian” refugee in exchange for his white cassock & Papal attire.

We’re a long way from Pope Nicholas III who introduced himself: “know that I was cloaked in the great mantle” (Inferno, XIX 69)

The Pope forgot his torch and had to get by with matches. He did not like one interrupting him, and I must confess I seldom had call to. Interrupting him one night as he was licking refugee feet, I asked him to light his face.

He did so, briefly switched off and resumed licking. Interrupting again I asked him to stop licking feet for a moment. That night things went no further.

The light, bright at first, gradually died down to no more than a yellow glimmer, and the Pope’s licking, to my surprise, persisted undiminished some little while.

This was a help, but not a real protection, as we shall see. Grey cloudless sky grey sand as far as eye can see long desert…sand pale as dust ah…but dust too deep to engulf the haughtiest monuments which to it once was here and there.

Now mingled with the ruins mingling with the dust….

the time would come when the Pope’s head would be cut off with the first stroke of the consecrated sword, piercing the darkness like a lightning flash.

Feet centre body radius will fall unbending….

Eagle the eye that shall discern him now mingled with the ruins mingled with the dust beneath a sky forsaken of its scavengers.

Vocal fold control was critical to the evolution of spoken language, much as it today allows us to learn vowel systems. It has, however, never been demonstrated directly in a non-human primate, leading to the suggestion that it evolved in the human lineage after divergence from great apes. Here, we provide the first evidence for real-time, dynamic and interactive vocal fold control in a great ape during an imitation “do-as-I-do” game with a human demonstrator. Notably, the orang-utan subject skilfully produced “wookies” – an idiosyncratic vocalization exhibiting a unique spectral profile among the orang-utan vocal repertoire. The subject instantaneously matched human-produced wookies as they were randomly modulated in pitch, adjusting his voice frequency up or down when the human demonstrator did so, readily generating distinct low vs. high frequency sub-variants. These sub-variants were significantly different from spontaneous ones (not produced in matching trials). Results indicate a latent capacity for vocal fold exercise in a great ape (i) in real-time, (ii) up and down the frequency spectrum, (iii) across a register range beyond the species-repertoire and, (iv) in a co-operative turn-taking social setup. Such ancestral capacity likely provided the neuro-behavioural basis of the more fine-tuned vocal fold control that is a human hallmark.